Comment on Meta Is Blocking Links to Pixelfed
lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 weeks agoEven if it was a honest mistake (is it? I have my doubts.), I don’t think that “we” (people in general) should give it a pass. On its best it highlights how unfair those automated systems are towards the users; plus Meta is in a position that it should be held responsible for what it does, regardless of its “intentions”.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 weeks ago
We just should take care not to spread misinformation. We need to stick with the truth. And It's not like the article says. And what they're infering is wrong, too. And seems that they didn't respond isn't up to date anymore, either.
Other than that, I agree. If somebody chooses to use a platform like this, they get entangled in some soulless machinery. And that machinery isn't there to help the user, but mainly to uphold whatever a big tech company likes. Mainly profit and control.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
We don’t need to lie about it; not even by omission.
In the best case scenario, Meta is employing an automated moderation system, it’s incorrectly tagging what users share as “spam”, and can’t be arsed to fix the issue in due time - note that this was already attested at least September 2024. That’s more than enough to blame Meta.
I see quite a few reasons to not trust = be gullible towards what Meta says. Starting by the fact that it’s on its best interests to silence mentions to competitors.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 weeks ago
Well, there isn't really a way around automated filtering. Spammers and malicious actors also send their stuff in bulk. And those big tech companies already have human content moderators. Usually in some poorer countries and it's a horrible job. I suppose there just arent enough humans to also deal with the flood of spam, manually.
These systems are far from perfect. And I'm not really an expert. I don't use Meta's platforms. I can't tell much from that screenshot. It's missing the URL and it hints at some rule that might be shown below.
And I didn't want to say "trust Meta". Quite the opposite. I just think this one specific claim could be true. Not everything is a conspiracy theory. We know they have automated apamfilters. And we know these make a lot of mistakes. Very similar with what other spamfilters do with short URLs. I'd say the simplest explanation is: their spamfilter sucks. Not that they somehow conspired, wrote additional software to deliberately target Pixelfed instances, but just when it's a short post... No. I think in this instance it's the simple explanation.